Porn is the worst addiction
Ok, that is hyperbole. I’m sure an addiction to hard drugs is more destructive to your life than a porn addiction. If that is you, you probably have bigger fish to fry.
For the rest of you, this is why porn addiction is probably the most destructive habit you have currently.
Deeply connected to your brain’s reward centers like nothing else with no natural limit
Drugs like caffeine and nicotine are very artificial, they don’t link to your brain’s most primitive means of survival. Caffeine and nicotine will only release dopamine.
Junk food is of course connected to your brain’s natural reward center. Junk food however doesn’t deeply wire to your need to socialise with other people, and generally you cannot spend that long eating junk food in a single session without feeling bloated. Junk food also feels worse the more of it you eat in one session, so it has a natural built-in mechanism to stop you overdoing it as much.
Porn addiction has no natural limit. You can watch it for hours and hours, releasing all the chemicals that are used to bond with other humans in a social and sexual context over that time. In porn addiction it is typically way more enjoyable to keep a session going on for ages than to orgasm and quickly be done with it. Usually orgasm is the worst part of a session. Reproduction releases the highest natural reward in the brain when compared to food.
Extremely accessible
Any other addiction usually requires you to go out of the way to get it. A porn relapse is only a click away, available immediately on tap. This accessibility contributes a lot to how hard it is to quit.
Psychosexually charged
Sex is a combination of two humans intimately involved in the experience, combining their own personalities with a physicality. It is a very human activity, a lot of the pleasure happens in the mind.
When someone watches porn for a long period of time, the user will inevitably form strong attraction to whatever porn category they watch repeatedly which often degenerates over time into worse and worse categories of porn. This embeds itself deeply in the psyche, and users will feel as if this is what they really crave over time. It’s you changing over time into something you were not before.
Think about your interactions in genuine dating/sexual situations with other people. Has your porn use contributed in any way to fucked up things you may have said to people, has it turned off other people dramatically in your behaviours? Have you acted in an overly sexual way to other people when it wasn’t appropriate? Have your inhibitions to what is appropriate and inappropriate changed over time? Has it been so long you think this is just who you are, a fucked up individual?
Compulsive porn use drags you away from the mean of what most people think is acceptable and normal behaviour. People will notice these subtleties and respond accordingly.
Parasocial relationships
Users often form parasocial relationships with porn actors they watch often, whether it’s the stereotypical person spending thousands of dollars on an OnlyFans model or just always gravitating toward one person and their pixels on the screen. Watching the same actor over and over bonds you to that person through the screen, even though you have never ever met them in real life and never will.
Sleep quality
When is the best time to watch porn? At night when nobody is there to disturb you of course. Porn users routinely will watch into the early hours of the morning, disrupting their sleep patterns significantly and affecting the rest of their life.
A huge recovery time
For severely addicted porn users it can take many months to years to recover normal sexual function. This is typical. Other addictions can be quit much faster and the benefits can be felt far sooner, without feeling broken for any of it.
Completely kills intimacy and desire for intimacy
Porn users often just give up on trying to find a partner entirely in the first place, convinced they are broken with no motivation to find a partner.
If you do find a partner or are in a relationship/marriage, the relationship will inevitably suffer almost as a law of the universe. Sex is far harder to enjoy, men can’t get erections as a result of their porn use, and inevitably issues will come up. This leads to greater feelings of frustration and shame which lead that user to go back to porn, their ultimate coping mechanism.
Get them while they’re young
The worst porn addiction cases start young. It is deeply embedded into developing brain circuitry at very young ages such as 11. For many this is their first experience of sexual release, a deeply perverted distortion of natural intimacy. Everyone knows that children’s brains are far more malleable. And use of porn at such a young age can and will cause developmental issues with how to act correctly when it comes to sexual activity.
The trend is other addictions come into people’s lives much later in a less embedded way, but porn is a true addiction for the very young.
Summary
Naturally I’m speaking from personal experience here. Of course for many people porn addiction isn’t the worst addiction for them. Other addictions can cause far worse physical health consequences for sure.
But there really isn’t anything that can bring someone to their knees quite like porn addiction. It appears to be more common and prevalent than other addictions. A universal tale of stuggle experienced by many people you will ask if you are having a frank discussion with them.